During a deployment, when comparing environments, you may receive a message highlighting a significant number of differences. In more extreme cases, the message may indicate that the 40,000-difference limit has been exceeded, leading to some differences not being displayed.
A high volume of differences is expected in scenarios such as sandbox seeding, configuration differences, permission issues and more. However, this isn't typical in many other cases.
This article focuses on helping you uncover the cause of excessive differences and offers ways to reduce them, minimizing unnecessary noise during the selection of changes to deploy.
Possible causes and solutions
Unrefreshed Sandbox: If deploying from an outdated sandbox, refreshing it can resolve this. If you prefer to avoid refreshing the sandbox because it contains un-promoted configuration changes, you can restore them using Salto’s restore feature after the refresh. Alternatively, you can selectively align the sandbox using Salto’s compare and deploy flow, avoiding a full refresh.
Difference in the Environments’ Fetch Configuration: For example, the source environment might exclude certain items during fetching, while the target environment includes them. Use an online tool like Diffchecker to compare configuration files and identify these differences. To resolve the issue, align the configurations to ensure consistency across environments.
Disabled/Enabled Application Features: Aligning the fetch configuration may not suffice if certain application features are enabled in one environment but not the other. In such cases, ensure both environments have similar enabled features, or exclude feature-specific elements from the configuration.
In Salesforce environments, install, upgrade or remove packages in the relevant orgs to get to an identical package state
In Netsuite environments, make sure that the same bundles and versions are installed in both environments
In Zendesk, the two environments may have a lot of differences in inactive elements. Learn more on how to handle this situation.
After aligning the two environments as much as possible as described above, comparisons should include only meaningful differences.
To further reduce the amount of differences shown, consider the following approaches:
Exclude Elements from Comparison: Salto allows you to exclude specific differences between elements across environments during comparisons. This helps you focus on meaningful changes by ignoring selected discrepancies that are not relevant for the comparison process, or differences which are expected such as endpoint URLs, emails or other credentials. Learn more
Switch to Deployment Based on Recent Changes: Instead of comparing source and target environments to identify all differences, consider starting your deployment with a list of changes made in the source environment within a specific timeframe. This approach allows you to select a snapshot of your source environment, compare it with its current state, and choose the changes to deploy to the target environment. This method can streamline the process and focus on relevant updates. Learn more